Everything was perfect (decent climate, less crowd and like minded friends) except the hotel. Right from the beginning we missed lot of things.

Started with the delay in fixing accommodation and not able to get final counts for room booking.

There wasn't much followup for the room bookings and later we saw many drop outs in last few days. We haven't acted quickly by discussing with hotel guys.

The pain was they charged extra for those rooms stating dropouts. The rooms were just ok, no water in bathroom,bad lunch and unavailability of breakfast, I feel it wasn't worth such money. It was more of home stay than a resort.

Those negative service, parts availability, poor dealer, bad sales experience etc made us embarrassed in front of our family and still we were able to smile like nothing happened. It was same scenario for us and we managed with smile in this situation as usual. The family also supportive as usual. only a Fiatian can even share those little unexpected expenses just to keep the brotherhood alive and keep going.

Thanks to Fiat for giving such friends. It gave us best best experience for us always and we learned an important lesson.

You were not a drop out from the list at all so no need to feel bad about it. In fact you just offered your room which you had paid advance to Muthu who came and occupied the room booked by you and your case was genuine as last minute you had to rush to Pollachi due to a condolence in your family.

Dhans - the resort was identified by the end of June itself by Syed & Aarvindh and by 1st week of July they had already established contact & we were exchanging mails with them and they also had got good tariff and we had already finalized everything with them wrt number of rooms based on the confirmations, head count of members & their families so there is no question of any delay in identifying & booking. We even had asked everyone if some one would also suggest any other resorts or take lead to identify & book on behalf of the team.

What happened was the cut of date for confirming about coming to the resort for the meet was kept at 11th July (Monday) and had been informed to all members who were to come even on this date some of the members did not confirm that they aren't coming & kept saying we are still hoping and one can agree that they really wanted to come as they did not want to miss the meet and by 13th Wednesday too till 14th we were kept waiting and then the cancellations & drop outs started from 12th onwards and such cancellations after 11th weren't accepted by the resort. Even Syed & Myself you would notice sent many reminders on WA.

A lot of messages were exchanged too in WhatsApp requesting members to update.

Pollachi Coimbatore members had confirmed about 6 of them coming and all of them dropped out at the last minute and the reason given was that one classic car would not start 1 or 2 days before the meet and they still could have made it in other cars but did not. That is 3 rooms straight.

Anyway what has happened is now past, what we have is learnt a good lesson to ensure that such mistakes should not happen in future.

So let us all just forget this as an experience as part of the group meet and let us move on in life. We have so many beautiful things to enjoy in life.

Sharing the difference amount for the 7 rooms on belahf of the members who dropped out is not going to deplete our resources in the savings.

We can feel happy we shared it for the forum for a good cause and held our heads high at the time of settling of bills with the resort as we all together as FIATians have always done holding our heads high driving our passionate cars.

So finally the MYFIATWORLD South India Meet at Yercaud was successfully completed and every one enjoyed the trip and I am sure next year we will have more participation and more members coming.

Such meets give all of us wonderful opportunity to meet each other, know each other make friends and feel good that along with us there are others who too share the common passion towards FIATs.

Only FIATs have such very strong & long history of owners who are die hard fans and associated with the brand and bonded for life which now others are trying to take up & copy. Some of our senior members who have been coming for meets have been regular from last many years and have been making it year after year.

Finally a big salute to every FIAT Lover in the Forum and a bigger salute to our FIAT Cars & FIAT which has brought all of us together.

On the way back from Yercaud to Chennai Sameer Farook's FIAT Grande Punto Ferrari Red in the Woods & thick forest

Anyway what has happened is now past, what we have is learnt a good lesson to ensure that such mistakes should not happen in future.

wish to add my 2 cents.. i had stayed in yercaud in end of april 2016 and remember this resort name(which i didnt book anyway). the prices below are inclusive of complimentary breakfast and discounted further when booked through mobile app.

it isnt a pleasant feel to see that my friends have been out-smarted by someone..

wish to add my 2 cents.. i had stayed in yercaud in end of april 2016 and remember this resort name(which i didnt book anyway). the prices below are inclusive of complimentary breakfast and discounted further when booked through mobile app.

it isnt a pleasant feel to see that my friends have been out-smarted by someone..

its our hard-earned money, afterall..

I have to agree that the hotel guys played very well. Hotels usually charge a cancellation amount around 25% of the cost but these guys bullied us into paying full amount for the cancelled rooms citing business loss. I wonder why the other rooms in the hotel were not occupied if there were so much of business for them :P

One thing I feel went wrong from our side was asking the members to transfer money to the hotel account directly. We should have collected them together by a cut off date.
Only people who had transferred money by the cut off date should have been deemed confirmed members and only those number of rooms should have been booked.
I can see that we believed some of the members will mostly make it and hence we kept the rooms till the last minute.

Anyways we learn from our mistakes and hope we don't get outsmarted on our future trips. Lesson well learnt!

Finally it was a great get together after all! Was good meeting the new faces from Bangalore and making friends. Thanks guys for making it.

Wish you could have shared this input on the tariff when the thread was being discussed & uploaded this information which would have definitely saved all of us a lot of money.

Sharing this input and update after the trip is over now isn't helping, in fact when this resort was contacted by Aarvindh & Syed they had quoted Rs.1800/- and I tried to bring them below 1500 and they refused and considering that we had 19 room requirements we had to decide and to be honest I also checked sites like Trip Advisor, IBIBO and other travel sites to find what resorts are available in Yercaud and even had called few of them, many had quoted over 2500 to 3500 which was way beyond our budget for 1 day.

With your information what you have now shared we could have negotiated with them based on this input. Furthermore many resorts charge based on the season too and on weekends and holiday seasons etc. So the prices are most often dynamic and not constant, more like an airline ticket which becomes costlier just a day before the flight takes off.

@ Naveen - We cannot straight away blame the resort only about cancellation amount around 25% of the cost to be collected etc, after all cancellations of 9 rooms definitely will be a business loss for them and they had blocked the rooms for our forum members and that's why they held us responsible because we had told them we will be needing 19 rooms and took only 10 rooms. Finally they agreed for 7 rooms to be settled.

We also need to introspect within ourselves and see how some of the members opted out for various reasons.

Each one had a genuine reason of his own for the cancellation and some actually did not have very valid reason (6 members were to come from Pollachi that means 3 rooms straight) and yet we absolve all of them after all they are our forum members.

As for sending payment to the resort I believe it was a better choice rather than one of the member collecting it and then paying it.

Let us move on friends and all these kind of debates will only bring sour taste to the mouth and mind.